All set?Let’s all do the al chet (10)

[A slight variant of this page will appear here 10 times. In each the text will remain essentially the same. However, I will add a link to a new “survey” each time.]

I have writ­ten else­where, that I came to the rab­binate out of “poli­ty” not “piety”. My involve­ment was as a com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er.

Nonethe­less, I recall sit­ting one Yom Kip­pur day in the late 1960s with a num­ber of friends who had formed a group called Or Hadash (New Light). There we were on a blan­ket in the heat of the day, some­where beyond the end of Alta Dri­ve or Fair Oaks Ave. in Ange­les Nation­al For­est above Altade­na, Cal­i­for­nia. We read the Al Chet to each oth­er. (I sent the papers I had that relat­ed to this group to the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Archives in 2007.) We actu­al­ly framed that expe­ri­ence as both poli­ty and piety. We felt that by talk­ing with each oth­er how we had hard­ened our hearts we were both ful­fill­ing the pious “oblig­a­tion” to recite our peo­ple’s text and at the same time build­ing a stronger more cohe­sive group.

ten times al chet

The Al Chet, an alpha­bet­i­cal acros­tic, is recit­ed as many as ten times through­out Yom Kip­pur. If we include its recita­tion on Seli­chot (the last Shab­bat before Rosh haShan­nah), that is even more. Per­haps we can approach this list in a dif­fer­ent way. How can we read these lines in a man­ner so that they retain their new­ness and urgency?

all twenty-two

א We have erred against You by אמוץ הלב hard­en­ing our hearts.

ב We have erred against You by בטוי שׂפתים speak­ing per­verse­ly.

ג We have erred against You גלוי ובסתר pub­licly and pri­vate­ly.

ד We have erred against You by דבור פה cor­rupt speech.

ה We have erred against You by הרהור הלב evil thought.

ו We have erred against You by ודוי פה insin­cere con­fes­sion.

ז We have erred against You זדון ובשׁגגה inten­tion­al­ly and unin­ten­tion­al­ly.

ח We have erred against You by חלול השׁם des­e­crat­ing your name.

ט We have erred against You by טפשׁות פה fool­ish talk.

י We have erred against You יודעים ובלא יודעים know­ing­ly and unknow­ing­ly.

כ We have erred against You by כפת שׁחד bribery.

ל We have erred against You by לשׁון הרע slan­der.

מ We have erred against You in מאכל ובמשׁתה eat­ing and drink­ing.

נ We have erred against You by נטית גרון false pride.

שׂ We have erred against You by שׂקור עין wan­ton glances.

ע We have erred against You by עזות מצח effron­tery.

פ We have erred against You by פלילות per­vert­ing jus­tice.

צ We have erred against You by צרות עין envy.

ק We have erred against You by קשׁיות ערף being stub­born.

ר We have erred against You by רכילות tale bear­ing.

שׂ We have erred against You by שׂנאת חנם cause­less hatred.

ת We have erred against You by תמהון לבב con­fu­sion of val­ues.

In the day of R. Ila’i, the entire con­cept of recit­ing such a list was fresh, new and chal­leng­ing. As oth­ers learned about his prac­tice, it is pos­si­ble that what at first may have been a free asso­ci­a­tion became more for­mal. It is not uncom­mon for what begins as “descrip­tion” to devel­op into “prescrip­tion”. (“I was with R. Ila’i at Yom Kip­pur last year and he did….”) What might hap­pen in our con­gre­ga­tions if we scrapped the litur­gi­cal read­ing of these lines and dis­cussed their con­tent instead?

al chet chart

how many different ways can we approach the al chet so that it retains its relevance?

I have used the tools of the Web (in par­tic­u­lar Sur­vey­Mon­key) to devel­op a num­ber of ques­tion­naires that may help us focus our atten­tion on dif­fer­ent aspects of the al chet. I’ll add a link to each one on a dif­fer­ent day. Feel free to take the “sur­vey” and share the link with oth­ers. As of this post­ing there are ten dif­fer­ent sur­veys. If you can think of anoth­er one, please add your thoughts in the com­ments.

1.
who participates in this kind of behavior, and how often?

Respond to each state­ment (there are 22 of them, one for each Hebrew let­ter) by select­ing with whom (at which lev­el of com­mu­nal liv­ing) you have expe­ri­enced and/or par­tic­i­pat­ed in this error and at what fre­quen­cy.

2.

3.

“this error was a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for me when I was…”

If a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­go­ry does not match your life, feel free to ignore it.
(If at some lat­er time it does, I expect to keep this online… as long as these phe­nom­e­na can remain online. If you can think of bet­ter cat­e­gories for the col­umn head­ers, please let me know.)

let’s all do the… what?

“Let’s all do the Cherkessia!” was the intro­duc­to­ry line of an “Israeli” line dance we learned as chil­dren. The only ref­er­ence to the dance on the Web is on a page that con­sists of no more than links to three oth­er pages that either no longer exist or no longer con­tain the infor­ma­tion orig­i­nal­ly promised.

I began creating a Web site in my head as early as August 1995 when I drafted the following

For a project I’m pursuing regarding Jewish involvement on the internet and the World Wide Web in particular, I’m interested in learning about any sites about which you may know. For example, do any rabbis have Home pages? Which synagogues or synagogue organizations have Web sites? Does Marge Piercy have a site at which you can read portions of "He She and It"? Does Howard Rheingold have a site where you can learn more about creating a Virtual [Jewish] Community? Is there a Web Camera at the Kotel? In the Wilderness of Zin?

¡warning!

This site remains under considerable reconstruction.

Most pages should still be available in their original location. However, I will be moving the vast majority of the old site (static html pages) into the Web 2.0 (blog) site. If you experience any "link rot", please let me know.

When I initially created this site I organized the material into what seemed to be meaningful categories (in the days before "tags"). But the time came when, it was hard to figure out which link to click if you wanted to know about Sammy Levinger's ("who"?) death ("what"?) while fighting during the Spanish Civil War ("when"?), though we had visited Belchite the site ("where?") of the battle where he sustained his mortal wounds. The new tools should make this process easier.

`//rite on!
,\\ark Hurvitz

Producing content on the Web since 1995.

some sayings of ר‘משבצונה“ל

For many years I have worked hard, and struggled with mastering virtuous. Now, in addition, I’m working on becoming more virtual.This is an expression of that effort.
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All photographs are by Mark Hurvitz unless they are obviously not (or credit otherwise is given).

The photos in the banner at the top (only a shallow sliver of a much larger photo) are either from our home or our travels and are offered for their beauty alone (though a brain-teaser for me: "Where was that?").